by Lev Grossman
“Nickleby?” Zeph took another swig. “You know what he is, he’s your fetch. It’s a Celtic myth: A fetch is a double, a creature that’s born at the same moment as you are and looks exactly like you. Woe betide you if you ever meet your fetch.” He snapped his fingers. “That’s it. Game over.”
“Yikes.” Edward stood up. “I’m going to the bathroom.”
Zeph and Caroline lived in a long, rambling, dusty apartment in the West Village that they’d bought outright with a truckload of stock options from a dot-com Caroline had walked away from at the right time. Virtually every wall was lined with shelves, including the kitchen and the bathroom, and on the shelves were Zeph and Caroline’s collection of small plastic toys: Chinese puzzles, LEGOs, action figures, Happy Meal prizes, Rubik’s Cubes, spheres, and dodecahedrons. Edward never understood what they saw in them. Zeph said they were good for his spatial visualization skills, though having seen Zeph’s senior thesis on low-dimensional topology, Edward thought his spatial visualization skills might already be morbidly overdeveloped.
On his way back Edward was surprised to find a small man standing in the hallway outside Zeph’s study. He was studying Zeph’s collection absorbedly. Edward had never seen him before.
“Hey,” said Edward.
“Hello,” the man said in a calm, liquid voice. His head was perfectly round, and he had fine, straight dark hair like a child’s.
Edward held out his hand.
“I’m Edward.”
The small man put the pink plastic pyramid he was playing with back on the shelf. Edward belatedly withdrew his hand.
“Are you a friend of Zeph’s?” he hazarded.
“No.”
The man-child, who really was tiny, barely five feet tall, looked up at him patiently, without blinking.
“So—”
“I used to work with Caroline. As a sysop.”
“Oh, yeah? Like in an office?”
“Exactly.” He beamed, as if he were delighted at Edward’s success. “Exactly. I kept the e-mail server and the local network running. Very interesting.”
“Was it.”
“Yes, it was.” He seemed to have no sense of irony whatsoever. “Consider the example of packet data. The moment you click SEND on an e-mail, your message splits up into a hundred separate pieces—we call them ‘packets.’ It’s like mailing a letter by ripping up a sheet of paper and tossing the pieces out the window. They wend their separate ways over the Internet, moving independently, wandering from server to server, but they all arrive at the same destination at the same time, where they spontaneously self-assemble again into a coherent message: your e-mail. Chaos becomes order. What is scattered is made whole.
“You learn a lot about human nature, too. It’s amazing what some people will leave on their hard drives, completely unencrypted.”
The man looked up at Edward and quirked an eyebrow at him meaningfully. Edward considered the possibility that he might be hitting on him. He was suddenly gripped with a burning desire to be back in Zeph’s study with his beer.
“Excuse me for just a moment,” he said. He sidled carefully past the man, avoiding physical contact as he would with a dog of uncertain provenance, and slipped back into Zeph’s study. He closed the door and stood with his back to it.
“You know there’s a gnome in your hallway.”
Caroline was there, sitting on Zeph’s knee. She was a small woman with a round face surrounded by a corona of curly, honey-brown hair. She had tiny, squinty eyes behind round steel glasses.
“I see you met our friend the Artiste,” she said. Her voice was the opposite of Zeph’s: a breathy, baby-doll, Blossom Dearie voice.
“He followed her home one day,” said Zeph. “Now he shows up and hangs around sometimes. He’s pretty harmless.”
Edward looked from one to the other.
“You just let him wander around your house like that?”
“He’ll leave eventually,” Caroline explained. “It freaked me out at first, but after a while I figured out that you don’t have to pay any attention to him. He’s mildly autistic, something called Asperger Syndrome. He’s pretty functional. It doesn’t interfere with his intelligence—he’s probably smarter than all three of us put together—but it means he has trouble dealing with people. And he gets obsessive about certain things, like computers. Actually, it’s good to have him around. He’s an unbelievable programmer. He works freelance.”
“Sometimes he slips into machine language while he’s talking,” Zeph added. “Just ones and zeros.” He shuddered, hugging his massive shoulders. “Creepy.”
“And so he just has the one name?”
Caroline frowned at him. “Be nice, Edward. The Artiste does the best he can. Zephram, is Edward coming with us tonight?”
“I haven’t asked him. Want to come to a party, Edward?”
“I don’t know. I’m kind of tired after all that filing.”
Zeph picked up a chunk of volcanic glass that held down a stack of papers and retrieved a small, cream-colored envelope.
“Do you remember a guy in college named Joe Fabrikant?” he asked.
“Fabrikant?” Edward frowned. “I guess so. Blond. Prep-school type.”
“We’re doing some back-end stuff for his intranet.” Caroline shifted herself down onto Zeph’s lap. “Database stuff. He’s dreamy.”
“He makes tons of money,” said Zeph. “The big success story from our class.”
“He’s one of these genetically perfect people. He looks like a giant Norse god.”
Zeph passed the envelope to Caroline, who leaned forward and passed it to Edward. Inside was a simple card with an invitation to a party on it.
“I’m sure he has no idea who I am,” said Edward.
“Actually, he asked us to ask you.”
“Really?” That was odd.
Zeph shrugged.
“You came up. I guess he heard about your London gig. Gave him a hard-on. He remembers you from school.”
Caroline hauled over the keyboard and started another game of Adventure.
“Come on,” Zeph said. “There’s free booze. You can suck up to influential people. Uninfluential people will suck up to you. You’ll love it.”
Edward didn’t answer. Zeph was right, and on any other night in the past four years he would have jumped at the invitation. Why not tonight? He thought about all the people who would be there—people he knew or half knew, like Fabrikant, and people he’d never met but whom he nonetheless knew down to the very bottom lines of their xeroxed, stapled, and collated souls.
It was hot, and he took off his jacket and draped it carefully over the arm of his chair. He took another sip from his beer. On the screen, Caroline’s yellow square passed the entrance to a corridor that was blocked off by a plain black line.
“Can you go through there?”
“Nope. That’s a force field. Verboten.”
Caroline was in the courtyard of the black castle, in front of the portcullis. Three duck-dragons, red, yellow, and green, were chasing her around and around in a circle. She teased them, staying just out of their reach, but after a while she miscalculated and got caught in the red dragon’s teeth. The square stopped, vibrating in panic for a moment, then there was a swallowing sound and it slid down the dragon’s throat into its stomach.
“Hard cheese, old girl,” said Zeph.
They watched the screen in funereal silence. Absurdly, through a glitch in their programming, the other dragons apparently didn’t realize the square was dead, and they kept on circling and biting at it in the red dragon’s stomach. The black bat entered the screen from the upper left corner. Off in another part of the apartment music was playing; it sounded like “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.”
“Damn it,” Zeph said. “He’s into our CD collection.”
“Hang on,” Caroline said. “Wait a second—this sometimes happens.”
The bat flew diagonally, apparently unimpeded by walls. It made se
veral preliminary passes through the room, cutting through it at an angle, then it changed course deliberately and without slowing down picked up the red dragon and flew away with it. The square came with it, still in the dragon’s stomach, and the camera shifted to follow them. The bat flew them willy-nilly through mazes, castles, hallways, secret chambers. It was like being a ghost on a madcap, high-speed haunting spree, a whirlwind tour of the hidden corners of the universe.
Suddenly Edward realized that he was exhausted. Zeph and Caroline, much as he loved them, were geeks, and it was getting to be a little much. Anyway, he should stop by the office and clear up this business about the Wents before his boss left for the night. He looked at his watch.
“I should go,” he said.
“I’ll walk you out.” Zeph pushed himself upright, shoving the futon violently back against the wall.
Edward followed him out into the hallway. They walked out into the small, dark living room. The air was heavy with some unfamiliar spice that smelled like Indian food, probably from the restaurant across the street. Caroline’s desk was out here, with her books and files scattered around it.
“Wait.” Zeph stopped. “Hang on a second.”
He ducked back into the hallway and came back with a small square manila envelope, the kind with a red string fastener.
“For you.”
Edward carefully unwound the string. He opened the flap and tipped the contents out into his hand. It was a CD.
“Sorry I don’t have a case for it,” Zeph said.
Edward studied its mirrored surface; he caught a glimpse of his face in it, glorified like a medieval saint’s, with prismatic highlights. He turned it over. It was completely blank.
“What is it?”
“Something to keep you busy,” said Zeph. “Burned it m’self.”
“Is it music?”
“It’s a game.”
“A computer game?” Edward said, with a sinking feeling. “You mean like Tetris or something?”
Zeph nodded.
“The Artiste got me hooked on it, actually. It’s amazing.”
Edward did his best to look enthused.
“What’s it called?”
“Doesn’t have a name. Some people call it MOMUS, I don’t know why. It’s what they call an open source project. Means it’s a collaboration between lots of different people over the Internet. Try it, it’s a great escape. Really addictive.”
“Great. Thanks a lot.” Edward put the disc back in the envelope, holding it with his thumb and forefinger like a dead insect, and delicately wound up the string again. Oblivious to his dismay, Zeph offered him his hand, a little self-consciously, and Edward shook it.
“Anyway, congratulations. Happy promotion. I’ll call you later about that party. Have some fun for a change.” Zeph shot the bolt. “It wouldn’t be the end of the world.”
OUTSIDE IN THE STREET it was early evening. Zeph and Caroline’s apartment was in the West Village, near Washington Square Park. Edward strolled over to Sixth Avenue and turned right, heading uptown. He felt tired and strangely passive. Was he going to the office? No, he decided, he was not. He was too tired. He’d call in tomorrow morning instead.
The sun was setting, but the afternoon heat showed no sign of subsiding. Edward took a deep breath. The air had a complicated but not unpleasant smell, a uniquely New York smell composed of smoke from the sidewalk gyro vendors, fumes from the subway, steam from a million coffee cups, the delicate evaporations from the glistening surfaces of thousands of fifteen-dollar cosmopolitans. A movie crew was setting up on the busy sidewalk, running fat black electrical cables in and out of unmarked white trailers, rerouting passersby into the street. Three card tables stood by themselves off to one side loaded down with pasta salad and veggie wraps and cans of diet soda all mummified in plastic wrap. The crew had sprayed sticky white foam like shaving cream all over the pavement to simulate snow for a winter scene. The surrealness of it all in the heat gave Edward a disconnected, dissociated feeling.
He flagged down a taxi at Fourteenth Street. The driver didn’t answer when Edward gave him his destination—his name on the license sounded Chinese—but he seemed to understand. Edward’s cell phone rang: Andre again. He let it ring. The cab’s black upholstery had been patched so many times it was more duct tape than vinyl, but it was soft and springy, and the seat was tilted sharply backward. He had to fight the urge to close his eyes and take a nap. He watched limply out the window as the hip facades of Chelsea became the shiny metal-and-glass cliffs of midtown, then transmogrified into the soft gray-green of Central Park, with its lumpy landscaped hillocks and its Victorian folly bridges with their intricate, crumbling, urine-soaked brickwork.
Maybe it was the beer he drank at Zeph’s, but he really did feel utterly exhausted, body-slammed, wiped out. He’d been working way too hard these past few months—binging on work, wallowing in it, gorging on it, sixty, seventy, eighty hours a week. The more work he did the more there was to do, and he could always find a little more appetite for it, and a little more room in his belly to stuff it down. The only thing that was finite was time, and you could always fix that by sleeping less. Every evening as he set his clock radio he calculated how little he could get by on, like a diver making a dive plan for a dangerous nighttime descent: balancing the pressures, estimating his endurance, rationing his precious reserves.
Images from the past six months crowded into his mind, as if the force fields holding them back had suddenly vanished or given way. The permanent twilight of midtown; the not-unattractive face of his assistant, already at her desk when he came in in the morning; the comfy leather chair in his office; the accusing red eye of his voice mail, glaring at him like the malevolent eye of HAL; the firm handshakes with lawyers; his cell phone ringing everywhere—while he was shaving, in a movie, in a stall in the bathroom at La Guardia. Lately the blinking e-mail icon in the upper right-hand corner of his desktop had started appearing in his peripheral vision even when he was away from his desk, causing him to jerk his head up at nothing like an insane person. Three or four times a month he’d pull an all-nighter, doing push-ups on the carpet to stay awake till six, little muscles jumping in his chest from all the caffeine, his jaw clenched like an iron robot’s jaw. He would take a car home in the grim quiet of early dawn, feeling like he’d been clubbed in the head. He’d go upstairs and shower, telling himself he felt fine, perfectly fine, good to go, and put on a fresh shirt. Straightening his tie in his kitchen, leaning on his still brand-new stove—he’d never even had the gas turned on—he could see the company car idling by the curb, sending puffs of white exhaust floating up into the early morning air, waiting to take him back to the office for a briefing at seven thirty—
Edward snapped awake as the Chinese driver pulled up in front of his building. He had to struggle to get his wallet out of the front pocket of his pants. He was so tired he felt like he could fall asleep at any second, right in the middle of the sidewalk. For a minute he stabbed futilely at his front door with the key to his office before he found his building key. He was going to pass out. Finally he was inside, he was climbing the stairs, he was closing the latches behind him in his apartment. He didn’t even make it to the bedroom, just lay facedown on the couch.
3
GROWING UP IN MAINE, Edward hadn’t especially wanted to be an investment banker, or anything else for that matter. He wasn’t one of those children who had his sights set on being something specific: a doctor, or a fireman, or an astronaut with a mission specialty in long-range sensing. When he thought about his childhood, which was rarely, the image that came to mind was of watching snow pile up on a porch railing in the late afternoon, the line of it holding perfectly steady like the line on a graph, then curving up a little where it rose to meet the corner post, and wondering if school would be canceled tomorrow.
His family lived in an old white-painted Victorian house with a thinning patch of lawn out front and a tire swing in back. His parents we
re ex-hippies, communards who turned out not to have the stomach for life on the farm, and by the time they went straight they found themselves established in the narrow suburban fringe that encircled the old brick city of Bangor and separated it from the cold, piney vastness beyond.
Bangor was a nineteenth-century lumber capital fallen on hard times. It took a lot of snow to cancel school, but fortunately for Edward, Bangor got a lot of snow. If it started before he went to bed—and the later it started, the better his chances were—he would lie awake listening to the snow-muffled silence, and once his parents were asleep he would shine a flashlight out the window, watching each snowflake gleam once as it passed through the beam and then vanished into collective anonymity on the lawn. He would stare feverishly out into the moonless darkness and try to gauge the frequency and quality of the flakes, factoring in temperature and duration, humidity and wind speed, praying inarticulate but fervent prayers to the Superintendent of Schools. Usually he would wake up to the sound of the snowplow scraping orange sparks from the asphalt as it bulled its way down the street, followed a few minutes later by the roar of the sand truck, burying his hopes in a mixture of dirt and road salt.
Growing up in that black-and-white landscape, with snow on the ground from October to May, it made a certain kind of sense that Edward would have a gift for chess.
Once, while his mother was driving them the five hours south to Boston to see relatives, Edward’s father gave him an indulgent ten-minute lesson on a miniature magnetic travel chess set, passing it back and forth between the front and back seats. Edward stalemated his father on the first try, beat him on the second, and never lost again. He was seven. For the next five years he spent every weekend—all of Saturday and most of Sunday—at a chess club in Camden, a once grand, now shabby mansion that smelled of peeling wallpaper and old horsehair upholstery. It was populated almost exclusively by annoyingly precocious little boys like Edward and melancholy old men, including two homesick Russian émigrés who would mutter Bozhe moi! and Chyort vozmi! through their flowing beards as Edward gracefully trapped their knights and forked their rooks.
